While San Diego's North County Times could have been reporting on Friday's protest outside the Registrar of Voters' office, instead the NCTimes donated its column-inches to the noble cause of further misinforming the public about the June 6 election debacle and the people's fight for democracy.

A voter's request for a recount of the June 6 special election ballots from the 50th Congressional District has been halted because the woman requesting the recount did not pay a required fee, the San Diego County Registrar's office said this week.

The poor woman went to all the trouble of filing for a hand count under the recount provision and then didn't bother to pay the fee, eh? Not so fast. It just might be relevant to mention that it was an improperly required fee. The only fees the Registrar of Voters' office is allowed to charge are the actual costs of a recount. The exorbitant $6,000 demanded by the RoV's office as a deposit for the first day’s counting should have been reduced significantly when the voter requesting the recount advised the RoV that no counting panel would be needed on the first day, as she was still awaiting documents needed in order to proceed with the recount. Haas has failed to provide these documents despite Barbara Gail Jacobsen’s being legally entitled to have them and despite—or perhaps because of—their significance to the recount.

And why weren't the documents provided? What is Haas trying to hide?

San Diego resident Barbara Jacobson earlier this month requested a hand recount of the more than 158,000 ballots cast in the June 6 runoff election to replace former Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham. Republican Brian Bilbray beat Democratic opponent Francine Busby by more than 5 percentage points in the special election runoff.

It might be true that Brian Bilbray beat Francine Busby by more than five percentage points. But neither reporter Schultz nor RoV Haas knows that. No one will know who won this election until the paper ballots and paper trails have been counted by hand. It’s time for the media to stop reporting as fact claims that they cannot verify. This election was held on uncertified and therefore illegal voting machines. Votes cast on illegal machines are votes illegally cast.

As CA-50 Action Committee Coordinator Judy Hess pointed out in her speech at the protest the NCTimes failed to cover on Friday, "[N]one of us actually cast legal votes. Instead, we all engaged in an exercise which looked like voting, and felt like voting, but was not, in fact, and as a matter of law, actual voting." Her full speech is worth reading (and you can find it at the bottom of this post).

The recount request was one of a number of public calls for scrutiny of the voting machines used in the June 6 runoff. Election reformers argue that the voting machines were vulnerable to tampering and, therefore, the election results are not valid. But they have not pointed to proof that tampering took place.

No proof of tampering is necessary here. The machines having been exposed to the risk of tampering that would be undetectableis enough to decertify them for use in the election, according to California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson’s own conditional certification of the Diebold machines .

If it’s no problem to conduct an election on illegal voting machines, why is the State bothering to certify voting machines in the first place? Why not use a toaster to process votes? That would at least make it clearer that at this point our democracy is toast!

Haas has said registrars across the state frequently let precinct captains take the machines home before an election, so they will be able to have machines at polling places early on election day.

Officials with the Secretary of State's office have said there is no law prohibiting such a practice.

Yes, electronic voting machines have been sent home with poll workers in the past. But that was before new state and federal regulations issued earlier this year, which make voting machine sleepovers no longer viable, legal or secure. Why would Haas fail to mention that minor detail? What is he hiding? Can you say "C-Y-A?"

…[T]he CA-50 Action Committee is forming to collect money to legally challenge the registrar. The group does not necessarily plan to call for a recount, said spokeswoman Judy Hess.

Just a quick note on that one. Notice the sentence construction? This group of hard-working, committed volunteers has what purpose? To "collect money...." Not quite. The purpose of the CA-50 Action Committee is to promote election integrity, not to collect money.

"This is not necessarily about challenging the outcome [of the election]," Hess said in a phone interview Friday. "This is about the fact that we contend our elections were not valid."

In other words, the CA-50 Action Committee, of which I am a member, is not claiming that the announced outcome of the election is incorrect. We are not claiming that Francine Busby won. We are claiming—declaring, in fact—that no one knows who won the election. We are absolutely challenging the announcement of an outcome when none can be verified.

"The most important thing is that people in San Diego County can have full confidence in the voting process."

If Busby is correctly quoted here then she’s missing a crucial point. The most important thing is not that voters have full confidence, but that there be a basis for confidence. Public confidence can be manufactured by government disinformation such as has become Mikel Haas’s hobby of late and media disinformation such as Schultz’s article. But a disinformed yet confident public does not a democracy make. We deserve and demand transparent, verifiable elections.

Now there’s something in the article I can agree with! Did you get that? “Contact Erin Schultz.” Tell her how confident you’re feeling about your democracy these days. And while you’re at it, tell her how confident you feel about the media when it reports facts it cannot independently verify.

***

Here is the full text of the speech delivered by Judy Hess on July 21, 2006.

Hello, and thank you for coming to this Rally to support our rights as voters.

My name is Judy Hess, and I am the Coordinator of the CA 50 Action Committee, an organization formed to respond to the security failures in the June 6 Primary and Special Election in the 50th District of the State of California.

As you may know, members of the CA 50 Action Committee and other voting integrity groups appeared before the County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday to ask that they have open hearings about those security vulnerabilities. I was not allowed to complete my statement before the Board, and I would like to share it with you now.

On June 6, 2006, we went to our polling places and filled out the appropriate spaces on our paper ballots, and fed those ballots into the optical scanners. However, it is my belief that none of us actually cast legal votes. Instead, we all engaged in an exercise which looked like voting, and felt like voting, but was not, in fact, and as a matter of law, actual voting.

The reason is this: before our optical scanners and touch screen machines arrived at the polls, they had been technically decertified by the removal, days and weeks before, of these machines from the safekeeping of the Registrar of Voters. They went into homes, garages and cars, and stayed there until the morning of the election. These security breaches rendered them decertified by Federal and State standards.

Moreover, these particular machines—the optical scanners on which almost all of our votes were counted have profound security vulnerabilities.

One person, in one minute, can hack this model, change the results of an entire election and leave NO trace of the hacking.

At my polling place at Olympic View Elementary School in Eastlake Greens, we shared space in the school auditorium with Precinct No. 533120.

My polling place opened promptly and efficiently at 7am.

However the optical scanners, ballots and all other equipment needed by Precinct No. 533120 were absent without leave.

They remained absent until 11:18 am while a parade of horribles took place.

The person delivering everything could not be found. Pollworkers at the direction of the Registrar of Voters made 3 attempts to meet with the individual who had the equipment—at a Lowe's parking lot, at an IHOP parking lot, and in front of a 7/11 store directly across the street from Southwestern College, but the poll workers returned to the auditorium, each time empty handed and unhappy. This individual simply did not show up at the rendezvous points. I was told by a poll worker that they understood the Registrar was about to have the police search for her.

Ultimately the machines arrived, and the polls opened a few minutes after noon. But no one can know where they had been, for how long, or what had happened to them.

I submit to you representative photographs of events as I personally recorded them.

I point out that I am a Democrat, but the Precinct on whose behalf I speak today is predominantly Republican. This is an American issue, not a partisan one.

I submit to you that having these voting machines out of the custody of our Registrar and rendered insecure and decertified is a violation of the sanctity of our most fundamental democratic process.

I urge you to investigate these sleepovers, and the entire voting process in San Diego County for November, lest we again engage in what a court of law may later deem a sham exercise.

This story tells us that we need the CA 50 Action Committee.

We have formed to make all of our votes matter. We have formed to call this Registrar to account. We have formed to make sure that this election fiasco cannot happen again, and we are prepared to take whatever legal action is necessary to make our voting process secure.

The June 6 Congressional Election in the 50th District was the first in the election cycle of 2006, when we will, as a nation, decide our collective future, in a time of great world peril.

This San Diego County elective process, with hackable machines in homes, cars and who knows where, is no way to start the cycle with 435 House Seats will be on the ballot in November.

UPDATE {from WP}: Many thanks to "kenelson" for posting a link to the current location of the NCTimes article. I have updated Emily's piece accordingly. Please note that you can leave comments about this article at the bottom of this page. You can also send feedback directly to the author, Erin Schultz, at eschultz@nctimes.com. And we hope that you will do so.

Bobby Kennedy has the right idea. Can we start suing newspapers for printing lies and misinformation? MSM lies and misinformation: MORE POWERFUL THAN THE MILITARY! That's why Hitler had a "ministry of propoganda."

I think we USED to be able to sue for that sort of thing, but somebody told me that Reagan ripped out the laws protecting us from such abuses.... Right about the same time you stopped seeing public service announcements on tv, was when it stopped being verboten to tell known whoppers on the air, in the media. Obviously, I'm unclear on the history, but the duty to be truthful in reporting and the mandate for truth in advertising, are long gone. We need an overhaul really, really badly!

Truth: it's a concept that's been quietly eroded, a process which has been accelerating alarmingly since 1980. Now that's a year I'd like to "precede," once we get our time-traveling skills working properly,99!

Thank you, Emily, for this post. It's hard to say which emotion predominates over this situation and its obfuscation: extreme anger or quaking dread over this promise of things to come. But we need to keep shouting and hammering!

Yes, Big Dan, they can just print lies. They can print the lies they hear from other people, or they can make up their own lies.

There are some constraints, of course. For instance, they can't tell a lie that directly defames someone who is in a position to take legal action against them. In other words, they can lie for Mikel Haas but they cannot lie about him, unless their lies are complimentary.

Why? Because he has resources. A bit of money. A bit of political power. Some well-connected friends. Stuff like that. Newspapers don't usually tell lies defaming people who have these kinds of resources. They usually tell lies defaming their critics.

As for the critics, they are mostly regular guys like you and me. And they can lie about us all they like. And they do. It's been going on ... like ... FOREVER.

That is the crux of our whole legal system. If you've got the wealth you can do just about anything you want and buy your way out of it or buy just a slap on the wrist.
The average guy living paycheck to paycheck doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell to either defend himself or take action against someone who is screwing him.

It strikes me that there’s another story of a recount that is not happening, and needs to-—the Alaska Democratic Party lawsuit to find out what happened in the 2004 election, to over 100,000 votes in Alaska.

I know that you all know all about the Alaska story on the 2004 results. I’d just like to suggest finding some way to revisit it now and then, so that the public in general become aware of it. After all, it’s a case in a national election, where the official count is documented to be off by 100,000 votes from the county-by-county results. I think it’s pretty damning that the state officials are putting up with Diebold’s refusal to release the records of the official counting. And I love the irony of the Democratic Party having a lawsuit to find out what happened to Republican votes. Further, there’s nothing to suggest that such a discrepancy couldn’t happen again, and in a key battleground state.

So for all those reasons, it’s a good story to try to push the MSM to get on. It is powerful evidence that we need to get computers OUT of elections. It should be revisited here now and then, I think.

Maybe 6 or 7 of us should picket outside the NC Times Offices with signs saying something like:"Why is Mikel Haas Lying And Why Is The North County Times Helping Him?"
Perhaps that would get their attention, especially if we sent out Press Releases to get other media to cover the protest. Any other ideas out there?

Concern had been heightened by a series of articles published in the summer of 1985 in the New York Times. The articles cited statements by two computer experts reporting that a computer program widely used for vote-tallying was vulnerable to tampering. Several elections were identified in which losing candidates claimed that it would be possible to fraudulently alter the computer programs that were used in their contests.

Debra Bowen has to step up to the plate here. This issue is right up her alley...the responsibility of election officials to respond to legitimate demands by citizens and voting-rights organizations.

We can yell and scream and make one another more righteously indignant, which feels good. But outside of legal action, which could be delayed until after the November elections, only proactivity by people in Sacramento will have practical effect.

WP & BB2: Great comments. I've been saying (recurring) where are all the "liberals with money" for a while? Actors, musicians, Soros, etc... Where the F*** are they? It's not pressing to them that we're having Democracy stolen, because they are "comfortable", they have lots of money. It's the same with the Dems. Where are they on a lot of these issues, on which they remain silent? It's the same thing. They people like us don't have the resources and time, we are the people pointing out this stuff. Where is Bono on e-vote fraud? Not just in the U.S., btw... They are "comfortable", it doesn't affect their lives like it does ours.

Yes, the average guy/chick living from paycheck to paycheck doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell, without the help of these silent, well-off liberals and Democrats who are silent.

People like Brad, are the hero's, not the silent liberals. Huffington Post falls into that category, too.

Went to a party this weekend and talked to different people about issues in this country such as eel-lectronic voting, corporate contribution to political parties controlling parties that are SUPPOSE TO BE the interests of Americans etc, 9/11, the environment, and ah da mass controlled media. Thank you Brad and Co. for your efforts on this San Diego election. The most common thread i see is what you all are talking about. The MIS-INFORMATION OF THE MASS MEDIA. The average educated joe either doesn't know the real truth from what he reads or a distortion thereof thus we are not all on the same page.

Take 9/11: Many Americans have seen 2 towers hit by airplanes and go down although they have never investigated any further. Just what the Bushit administration wanted the majority of people in this country to believe. Put it in your head that the government would not fly commercial aircraft into the twin towers and this come to be what is remembered of the Bush-Cheney norad controlled event which was used to take away US Citizen's right with the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act as well as attack IRAQ. Hitler and Joseph Gobles who was in charge of Nazi propaganda would be proud.

My point, many American people accept this as a terrorist attack which is routinely well supported in mass media newspapers etc. So "we the people" are effectively disabled. Disabled to make intelligent decisions for our well being as well as go after the criminals stealing our elections and destroying our fragile atmosphere when we still have a blink of an eye to save her. Lastly, these criminal lying murderers still act as our representatives instead of being tried in a court of law this 1st Bushit day of terror. Everyone must see LOUDER THAN WORDS 2nd Edition at www.loosechange911.com dedicated to those who died on 9/11.

Until we restore truth to our media, these bastard will get away with their crimes.

Big Dan, I wish we could hold the media accountable moreso and be able to sue them when they facilitate lies. Unfortunately our courts let them get away with it. In fact, if you look up the case of those reporters of a then newly Fox-aquired affiliate Florida who were fired because they refused to alter their stories against Monsanto in Florida, Fox claimed the right to be able to define the truth the way they "saw it", which the court supported in allowing them to successfully appeal the lawsuit the employees had previously won. Now, maybe if their motto "Fair and Balanced", had some sort of verbage selling trust and truth instead of just "fairness", litigants might have more of a successful suit against them.

With greater media consolidation and the resultant more powerful lobbying (aka bribery) they can employe, it is just going to get worse. Just look at Murdoch's DirecTV looking to buy out Dish Network this week to build a satellite TV monopoly for Foxco. If that is allowed to happen folks, kiss channels like Free Speech TV, Link TV, Sundance Channel and other channels that offer non-propaganda news goodbye.

"I don't think so, because you'd have to want to commit a felony, which knocks out most of our poll workers."

"I'm sure they could stick something in the system…Whether it's detectable or not, I'm pretty sure that it is. But again, you're tampering with election equipment, so it seems unlikely."

--

Brad, what is the evidence for these statements? Is it on tape? The 'Dirty Minds' part of this is VERY IMPORTANT, and yet it is hard to find these BOMBSHELL comments to you by Haas on the web or on this website.

1) Can you document these statements, perhaps releasing a .wav of the registrar making them?

2) Can you put these statements into some sort of featured area on Bradblog, where they won't be buried under all the other atrocities?

Another source for a similar statement is on page seven of the Declaration of Mikel Haas filed on Oct. 24, 2005, in San Diego Superior Court in case No. GIC 855773 before the Hon. Charles R. Hayes:

"The sort of access needed to 'exploit' the election system or alter the results in the manner suggested by Hursti would require a significant number of people, including highly placed Registrar of Voters' staff, willing to engage in a criminal conspiracy. I would never engage in or allow that sort of conduct among my staff, and I do not believe that there is any danger my staff would engage in that sort of conspiracy."

Apparently the judge believed that Diebold-inspired claptrap, as I lost the case. Since everything I alleged has now been prove factual, I sometimes wonder if the judge is aware of it and, if so, what he must be thinking.